Christos Polydorou

Microsoft Azure keeps growing and new regions are being announced and released one after the other, exceeding 60 at this time! New regions usually draw customers that are geographically located near them, with decreased latency being the key factor. Apart from new customers, large organizations usually move some of their workloads to the new regions for the same reasons. When designing a solution that is going to be deployed or extended to a recently released Azure region, you should always make sure that the resources that are part of your solution are available in that particular region. To make the life of the architects easier, Microsoft has created a webpage that provides service availability information and is available  here . This page will not only show you the regions that a  service is available from, but will also allow you to add all the components of your solution and confirm it's availability as a whole. Let's take for example a solution that comprises of Azure ...

The Azure Instance Metadata service is an Azure service that provides more information about Azure Virtual Machines that is invoked from the machine itself. This way, the administrators of the machine - that in most cases have no access to the Azure Portal - are able to get more information and troubleshoot potential issues. Let's use a linux virtual machine to get information from the metadata service! To get the data from the service, a simple HTTP call is all that is required. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, although we are using Automatic Private IP Addressing, we have to include the "Metadata" header so that the service won't mistake our call for a call that may be the result of a redirection. Second, the version of the API to use must be provided in every request. To get the allowed values, simply call the service without the "api-version" parameter and it should return a list of values: curl -H Metadata:true ...